WASHINGTON—Hedge funds. Monster newspaper chains. “News deserts.” Lack of ads.
Then there are repressive measures including barring of reporters from venues where decisions are made, arrests of workers, including news reporters just doing their jobs and direct threats of repercussions against publishers that come from the Trump administration.
The shaky status of freedom of the press in the U.S. in calendar 2025, was the topic of a recent two-hour forum News Guild hosted here.
Lest readers think the news business is just another special interest, speakers at the forum, from papers and public radio both in the U.S. and Canada, made a key point: Without independent media to hold politicians and corporations accountable for corruption, exploitation, misdeeds and excess, readers, listeners and viewers are captive to “silos” of misinformation and outright lies.
Worse, they’re deprived of accurate information about what’s going on in their own home towns, be it a big developer wanting to use eminent domain to scoop up someone’s house at a bargain-basement price and raze it, then build a shopping mall, or a politician with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar, trading favors for campaign contributions or even outright bribes.
But the need for accurate local journalism is a story journalists are either loath to tell—they don’t want to toot their own horns—or unskilled at telling. That must change, participants agreed.
A problem for years
The problem facing the news business has developed for years, ever since the advent of the Internet. Advertisers in the mainstream corporate media flocked to that medium, abandoning newspapers, especially local papers. And publishers, with few exceptions, couldn’t cope with the revenue drain.
The result, News Guild President Jon Schleuss said, is the number of newspapers in the U.S. has declined by 3,300 since 2005 and the number of working news journalists—as opposed to commentators, bloggers, and skillfully designed right-wing misinformation sites—has collapsed.
“One reason is the financialization of the news industry,” Schleuss explained, setting the scene. The new owners of distressed papers are often hedge funds, secretive cabals of investors who swoop in, buy papers, fire staffers—even those whom union contracts cover—sell off buildings and other valuable real estate, close the papers or cut them back, and then pocket the proceeds.
“Gannett cut 10,000 jobs just since its merger with Gatehouse,” enlarging what was already the nation’s largest newspaper chain, Schleuss said. “And Alden Global Capital,” the worst of the hedge fund owners, “has been reducing the number of journalists” at papers it owns—primarily those of the Chicago-based Tribune Company, plus papers in Denver and elsewhere.
Papers and stations that used to thrive, even outside major metro areas, fall on hard times. In one example, the small Ottaway chain, then part of Dow Jones, used to own the Middletown (N.Y.) Record covering three mid-Hudson counties.
It had a main newsroom downtown, six outlying bureaus and close to 40 news staffers. Now owned by Gannett, the Record still covers three counties, out of a small storefront newsroom in a suburban shopping mall. The total staff is four.
The Internet has hurt papers in two different ways. It robbed papers of ad revenue, as firms fled from even national papers to Meta, Google and TikTok. And Internet platforms poach remaining local content from papers without paying for it. When Oregon, and then Canada, planned to legally force the platforms to pay, the platforms retaliated by withdrawing from those jurisdictions.
The other looming threat is government action. It can range from mild to vicious. Mild moves include government officials going over journalists’ heads and posting their propaganda directly on the Internet, thus evading cross-checking and fact-checking.
Vicious moves include Republican President Donald Trump’s declaration of the press as “the enemy of the people” and getting multimillion-dollar “compromise “judgements” from scared broadcast network executives, fearful that unless they yielded, Trump’s regime would challenge their licenses.
The biggest such judgement was $815 million CBS paid, Schleuss noted.
And Trump also wages war on the media through his multibillionaire partner, Elon Musk. Musk recently showed up at the D.C. offices of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System to impose cuts on both cash and staff. Both systems get some money, though not most of it, from federal funds.
PBS distributes grants to local stations, who are more dependent on the money than nationally oriented stations such as WETA in D.C., WGBH in Boston and others in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. One local NPR staffer said his network must cover the entire upper half of Michigan with a skeleton staff, while trying to maintain eight transmitters. They need cash for both.
Had seven papers
There used to be seven local papers covering those 46 counties, the NPR staffer told the group. “Now they’re being bought up by hedge funds,” he said of the papers. Their future is uncertain.
And Trump’s war against people of color—specifically against “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) affected the nation’s newsrooms, Schleuss noted. “The book Murder the Truth has a lot of cases” that occurred “locally.” Papers that once hired people “who look like the communities they serve” now pull back from such commitments.
“All of the big companies are falling into line” with that withdrawal, commented Meg Trogolo of the Worcester (Mass.) Gazette. “I worry if Gannett is going to turn around on DEI. That’s nerve-wracking.”
Participants offered a variety of ideas about combatting the news deserts that result. One big response: Unionize. The News Guild has doubled in membership over the last decade, even as the number of overall news staffers crashed. Much of its growth has been in anti-union Texas and Florida.
“Under the first Trump administration,” from 2017-21, “there was a boom in for labor organizing” in the news business, as staffers flocked to the Guild to protect themselves against the hedge funds like Alden, or billionaire owners who insist on ideological slants, such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post.
“There were big breakthroughs under bad conditions,” one participant said. The breakthroughs included a revitalized Washington Post unit at the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and growth in Chicago—where staffers, with expertise from Schleuss—unionized at the anti-union Chicago Tribune. The same sequence, including Schleuss, occurred at the equally anti-union Los Angeles Times.
Other suggestions included outright lobbying by journalists for moves to help the industry, such as a subsidy recently enacted in Illinois, that gives grants to local papers specifically to hire and pay local reporters.
The Chicago News Guild and NABET, another Communications Workers sector, pushed their way onto the legislative advisory committee that wrote the measure, after that panel initially consisted only of bosses. One suggestion, not taken up, was to outlaw hedge funds and other such “financial instruments” entirely, restricting capital markets to stocks and bonds.
“Continue to reach out to other unions” and convince them of the importance of keeping local papers and local coverage alive, another participant said. After all, without the local paper, readers and viewers would be depending on slanted platforms—think Fox—for news about local trauma, such as workers being forced to strike.
There’s one more problem news workers confront, though, Schleuss admitted. Weak U.S. labor law. And that affects the entire labor movement south of the Canadian border. Canadian law, province by province, is much more pro-worker—despite the efforts of the erstwhile Tory government in Ontario to weaken it. That’s important, too, as Ontario has one-third of Canada’s population.
Since the Republican-run 80th Congress approved the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, over Democratic President Harry Truman’s veto, union organizing, elections, representation and more have been drastically weakened by a combination of legalisms the bosses threw up, bad federal court rulings and outright hate from the corporate class, starting with the PATCO strike in 1981.
“But they’re shredding labor law anyway,” Schleuss said of Trump and his troops. “So why wait” to organize, or to win back Congress and the White House, he asked. As an entire labor movement, “We won’t have the critical mass we need by 2028,” the next presidential election. “And by then, it’ll be way too late.”
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